Treasures Of Crowdsourcing – The Long Dark

I’m a fan of survival games. The Dead Linger, Don’t Starve, Day Z all get me going for a game that’s steeped in tension and fear, and manage to get across a feeling of despair and loneliness. One issue that I’ve always had with these games, however, is that they are all pretty fantastical. They involve zombies, or monsters that live in the dark, and so they’ve never quite managed to capture the feeling of survival in a real-life situation.

The Long Dark aims to capture survival in a situation that really could happen. After a geo-magnetic disaster which renders all electronics useless, it strands you in a snow-filled landscape after the main character crashes his plane there. You have to manage your temperate levels, hunger, and fend off animals that might want to hunt you, while trying to hold onto your human side. They task you with deciding between the survival of the self, and the survival of the group. It looks to be a compelling look at the way we could lose our humanity in an apocalypse situation, and is one that games like DayZ haven’t quite managed to offer yet. It’s a very interesting idea, and one that I recommend you check out over on Kickstarter, where the developers, Hinterland, have just launched their first prototype gameplay video.

If you’re looking for a survival game, and can manage to wait till the summer of 2014, I highly recommend checking them out, and maybe pledging a little bit of that games money you have squirreled away, so that they can get closer to their goal of $200,000 CAD.